Day 16: Freewrite 2 (Unorthodox Church)

Day 2 of my freewrite mini-series! Enjoy.

The following may be found here: more grammatical mistakes than usual, typos, jumps in thought, incoherence, and zanyness. You've been warned.
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I have to admit that I haven't always been the biggest fan of going to church. When I was younger I was always sort of a loner in youth group. I suppose I can't really blame the other kids too much, I was pretty quiet. But on top of that, I didn't go to the same schools they did and so while they were building friendships during the week, I was up the creek. I tried going to the whole "Wednesday night youth group" thing for a few weeks, but that didn't really do it either. I admit that sometimes I just really didn't want to go to church on Sunday mornings.

Then this amazing thing happened, God did something big. I hadn't been praying about it or anything like that, but in early high school a good friend of mine invited me to come on a retreat with his youth group. I remember thinking that it sounded awful but somehow or another I was talked into it. I was totally nervous about the whole thing but I ended up having a great time. When the retreat came around the next year, I went back and took some more friends with me.

I believe it was the third retreat of this sort when I finally stopped running from the call to fully submit my life to Christ. I had felt this call for a long time at the various "come forward" events, sermons, and the like but had been resisting. The retreat changed my life.

It was also from this series of retreats that I found a church home that I belonged at. Somewhere in the middle of all this I started driving (turned 16) and decided I would start going to my friend's church instead of the one I had been going to. Even though I had become much less quiet and was beginning to learn to be social with other people, my old youth group had become an alien place of little warmth. At my new church I found people who were always interested in what was going on in my life and friendly faces and smiles (with breakfast!).

Perhaps one of the reasons it was so friendly was because of how small it was. I mean this was a really tiny church. We're talking twenty to thirty people on any given Sunday. I began to enjoy going to church (though the drive was pretty long).

I've been thinking about church a lot lately because I've once again found a church that makes me enjoy getting up on Sunday morning to go. I've been going there for over a year now but I suppose I just now realized how I actually look forward to being at church on Sunday. I love the church so much that I'm starting to volunteer with the little kid's ministry at the early service by being a small group leader (a.k.a. playing with kids).

However, my church may not be what one would consider typical. There's no steeple, the sanctuary looks more like an auditorium, and a rocking band leads worship. Perhaps these kinds of churches are becoming more typical, but this was not the kind of church I grew up in. It isn't the kind of church that the 20-30 people church was either.

Here's another example of being untypical. Right now we've just finished up a sermon series called "Staying in Love" which is about exactly what it sounds like. So, since we're in a series on romance, the service opened today with the "top five 80s love song music videos." This included videos like Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran." Pretty strange right? But the best was the number one video. The number one video picked was Journey's "Seperate Ways." And instead of simply showing a clip from the video, they turned off the audio and the band played the song. And I mean the lead singer had a fake mullet, sounded just like Steve Perry, and the whole band shredded like Journey had just hit the scene. It was insanely awesome.

I'm still not entirely sure what Journey has to do with staying in love, but it was an epic church moment. And I'm sure there are plenty of people who might get upset about all this, but fooey on them. Why can't church be awesome? Why does it have to subscribe to some formula that is boring and completely shuts out anything interesting from the outside world?

Church is becoming more unorthodox and I think that this is (in general) a good thing. Christ did not come to die so that a new church based on legalism could be born. Christ set us free for freedom.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. (Galatians 5:1)

It's totally weird how God works such huge turnarounds in lives that embrace his call. I never thought I would see the day where I would get up in the morning and think of church as a joy instead of an obligation, but I've lived to see it. God never ceases to surprise me. It always seems that he sets it up so that the very things I say "I'll never do that" are the very things he calls me to do later on. Maybe he's just got an extremely cool sense of humor?

Freedom is a wonderful thing. I think I forget more often than not that being a Christ follower is supposed to be a freeing experience and not one where you memorize a set of rules and then set to work being a perfect person for the rest of your life. God's invasion of this world is so much bigger than that, so far beyond it, it's not even close to being about rules any more.

And I think that is a good note to end on :)

See you tomorrow.